Socrates | Critical Essay by A. D. Woozley

SOURCE: "Socrates on Disobeying the Law," in The Philosophy of Socrates: A Collection of Critical Essays, University of Notre Dame Press, 1971, pp. 299-318.

Here, Woozley studies the apparent discrepancy between (1) Socrates's statement at his trial that if he were discharged on the condition that he give up philosophy, he would disobey the order, and (2) Socrates's insistence after the trial, when prompted by a follower to escape, that he must obey the law.

I

Socrates is commonly characterised, and indeed on occasion characterised himself (or is so represented by Plato), as a negative thinker: one who provoked a member of his circle to propose a confident opinion on, say, the nature of virtue, or of one of the virtues, and who then proceeded, by unrelenting use of the elenchus method, to destroy first the opinion offered, and then the successive amendments and substitutions advanced to...